Yvonne Barnet interviewed about living in Hemel Hempstead

Interview for the ICO project New Towns, Our Town: Stories on Screen

Interviewed for the ICO New Towns project, Yvonne Barnet says she was born 27/3/1948 when her parents lived at Apsley. Her grandmother came from Luton where she worked as a machinist in a hat factory. She put a note with her contact details into a hatband, and the hat reached Australia where a lady wrote to Yvonne’s grandmother and they corresponded for many years. Yvonne’s mother was born in Hemel Hempstead and her father’s family are local to Gaddesden back to the seventeenth century. Her father worked at the bus station in Apsley. Her mother worked at Dickinson’s as a typist and secretary to Mr Cave, and she loved her job. Yvonne was young at the time the building of the New Town began. She went to Southfield School and Corner Hall School and remembers the pre-fabs on the hill which she liked. The interviewer asks Yvonne whether she remembers her feelings towards the New Town? She says she thought it was a lovely idea because it brought people into Hemel Hempstead, though she knows someone who found they were not welcome, but considered as a foreigner because they came from London. She says the town was incredibly changed, which was a good thing, and made the place more interesting. Asked about the shops, Yvonne recalls that there weren’t the cars then that there are now around Adeyfield Square. After the Second World War her parents lived with her grandparents for eight years in a small house lacking facilities – it had a shared outside toilet down the garden, running water just in the kitchen and no fridge. There was a tin bath in the coal shed which was brought into the house once a week. The house was very cold in winter. With the development of the New Town, her parents moved into a new house in Beechfield Road where they had a fire for heating and an inside toilet. Yvonne says ‘the camaraderie was wonderful in those days. People looked out for each other a lot. They really cared about each other. If your neighbour needed something you would help out.’ Her father suffered from ‘bad nerves’, maybe caused by the war but not talked about in those days. If he was distressed and went away from home, a neighbour who had been imprisoned in the Japanese camps would go out to look for him in his car, ‘a little jalopy’, and comfort him and bring him back. She says there was a community spirit, generally lost now. Yvonne recalls the railway line known as the Nickey Line which used to run from Hemel Hempstead. She says it was built to carry straw for plaiting for the Luton hat industry. Yvonne remembers people coming to watch when they blew it up (this was probably the demolition of the Marlowes railway viaduct on 2 July 1960 which many people came to witness).